The US has a strong tradition of prosecutorial discretion. DAs decline to charge people all the time, in court, with a written record. Cameras wouldn't necessarily require the death of leniency, although I see your point that they might encourage it if cops decide to be stricter that as a form of protest.
But who knows, that just might encourage people to repeal stupid laws *cough*non-violent possession*cough*.

In addition to the above two comments, if the policy changes the CAB is instituting impair sysadmin efficiency (and it sounds like they do), then the CAB should be held accountable for the effects of those changes. This means that they should have to find additional funding for additional sysadmins for these servers.

Or... you know... hire the best person for the job, not set a goal of having a 50/50 distribution?

Makes sense for the employee, but not for the employer; for the same reason that having a football team made up entirely of quarterbacks is a bad idea. A diversity of hiring (not just gender, but age, experience, background, and yes, skin colour) makes for a more diverse team that understands a much larger potential target market. It also has a much broader base of experiences to draw from during planning and decision making. All of this ultimately results in better software and better products.

There is no intrinsic value in someone's bodily traits that they cannot control, so "male and pale" are irrelevant factors for indoor jobs that aren't physically demanding. Adding vaginas and darker skin (or subtracting the same) has no effect to the ability to write code, create procedure analysis reports, put toothpase tubes in boxes, or use a microscope. Gender parity is flat-out irrelevant from the standpoint of hiring someone in a business to perform specific tasks.

Not even remotely true. The diversity of viewpoints exposed by hiring as broad a variety of people as possible make for better decision making, better analysis, and ultimate better software.

Here's another interesting way to examine it: in "gender-dominated job" arguments, replace "male/female" with "tall/short" and see how the emotions change. Gender naturally being a binary trait only makes it lower-hanging fruit for an "us vs. them" discrimination war, but perhaps there aren't enough short people in tech either! Why aren't we seeing a "more short people in tech initiative?" People are just as likely to be discriminated against for their height as their gender.

Ok, I'll bite. Having a decent variety of people of all heights (from very very tall to quite short) on a team would certainly allow you to design a better shelving system — the diversity of viewpoints allows for a much broader basis for design and accessibility. In this case "viewpoint" is even used literally: when you're 6'3", the top of the fridge is a shelf, and when you're 5'2", the top of the fridge is invisible.

Well, I personally think that the people controlling the jar have good business sense, and that gender parity in the IT industry is a good thing. That's probably true on a number of axes: the IT industry is too male, too pale, and too immature.

But whether you agree with that statement or not, I'm pretty sure that we can agree that they didn't set out to encourage more guys to take computer science courses and bungle it really badly.

your scenario presupposes that a 50/50 distribution of green and yellow marbles is a valid, just and reasonable goal.

No it doesn't — it presupposes that a 50/50 distribution is the desired goal of whoever is manipulating the jar of marbles. I think it's pretty clear that gender parity is in fact what the people making the incentive want.

If you don't think that is valid, just, or reasonable, you're free not to. You should argue that point with the people funding the incentive. Money is speech, so they're well within their first amendment rights, but maybe you could convince them.

Of course, you haven't provided any arguments at all why a 50/50 distribution of men and woman in the industry isn't a desired goal...

And also, there's the tiny problem that saying "having as many women as men in the IT industry isn't valid, just, or reasonable" does makes you sound like a bit of a dick.

No, seriously, why would anyone do anything else if the goal is gender parity in the industry?

Let's take gender out of the equation. Say you have a jar full of ten million marbles. 95% are green, 5% are yellow. 10000 marbles are added to the jar every year. Your goal is to make the jar 50% green, 50% yellow, and you can't take any marbles out of the jar. Changing the distribution of marbles added each year to 50/50 will never make the entire jar 50/50. The only way to solve the problem without removing existing marbles from the jar is to raise the distribution of marbles added to more than 50% yellow. Clearly the most effective solution problem is to only add yellow marbles to the jar at all.

Back in the real world: you either need to fire men who don't deserve it, hire equal numbers of men and women and wait a generation or two for enough people to retire, or try to hire more women than men. Because math.

I wonder if SAML/identity federation support for corporate twitter accounts is something twitter should develop as a paid feature? Corporate Security departments in large corporations would almost insist on signing up for that.

One of the subtle benefits of the computer revolution is that it gives society the ability to be wasteful.
Desktop computers that often aren't at 100% cpu utilization, and (local) networks that rarely see peak usage are also good signs, for the same reason. Hard drive capacities obviously aren't quite there yet, but they're getting closer.
This might be yet another sign of the singularity.

Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday April 10, 2010 @01:36PM
from the micturation-punishment dept.

Dutch researchers are working on a new application of an old technology that could mean bright color displays that draw much less power than conventional LCDs, according to the BBC. In this application, an instance of a technique known as electrowetting, droplets of colored oil in suspension are the basis for the display's colors; each pixel's color is determined by moving the colored oils with electrical current. A prototype reader from Dutch firm Liquivista is shown in the accompanying video; color magazines with 50-60hz refresh time using this display technology are at least a few years out, though. Significantly, these screens are daylight readable, which makes me wonder how they compare to Pixel-Qi style screens in power draw, brightness, and maximum density.